With the retirement of the historic space shuttle, the United States now runs the risk of becoming a supplicant: we will have no choice but to pay the Russians $60 million a seat to send a U.S. astronaut to the International Space Station. Instead of funding Russia’s space program, it would seem to anyone with the long view that these taxpayer dollars would be better spent investing in new NASA programs for commercial space flight and Mars exploration. These initiatives would put thousands of soon to be unemployed aerospace workers back to work and advance science and…

The Aerospace Industries Association strongly urges Congress to pass a FAA reauthorization extension to avoid serious disruptions to the agency.

“Congress needs to act quickly to extend FAA’s operations,” said AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey. “If the House and Senate cannot work out their differences on a full reauthorization bill in the time remaining, another short-term extension should be passed.”

The current FAA authorization—the 20th extension passed since September 2007—is set to expire Friday, July 22. Failure to extend authorization would have dire operational and economic consequences. Among the immediate impacts to FAA…

The Aerospace Industries Association commends the “Gang of Six” for their work towards a bipartisan deficit reduction deal.

“We applaud the efforts of the Gang of Six to move forward to reduce ongoing deficit spending,” said AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey. “While there is a great deal of work to be done on the details of the plan and they must ensure that cuts are applied appropriately and not indiscriminately, they should be congratulated for their determination to work together to put our nation on a sound financial footing.”

President Obama did more Friday than effectively rule out trillion-dollar defense cuts (“Obama lays down new marker in Defense spending debate,” July 15). He also brought a needed dose of sobriety to the debate, reminding those calling to slash defense during wartime that any cuts must be “consistent with our defense needs and our security needs.”

For months, extreme figures on both the left and right have called for severe cuts that would undermine our dominance in the skies and gut our industrial base and research capabilities for decades.

“For years the U.S. export control system has created confusion and delay in exporting defense equipment to our allies and driven up compliance costs across the industrial base,” said AIA President and CEO Marion C. Blakey. “These reforms are common sense ways of supporting our military partners and our export competitiveness.”

The rule proposes that after appropriate interagency review and consensus, technologies with low or no military or intelligence sensitivity will be…